Stuff and Fluff

So I bet most of you don’t know that Jeremy has been taking guitar lessons. One of the young women in our ward, Kim, has been teaching him as part of her senior project. He can play “Growing Old With You” from the movie “The Wedding Singer,” a Jack Johnson song called, “Angel,” and he is working on a Dashboard Confessional song. It’s pretty cool.

This weekend WSU had an open house at their vet hospital. It’s a big deal because they are one of the best vet schools and usually kids can’t take a tour. If kids brought in a stuffed animal, the vet students would do surgeries on them with the kids. Here is Zack giving his pet parrot anesthesia.

Clara giving her bunny anesthesia.

Zack and “Butch” the WSU mascot. That guy is everywhere!

Hayley (in middle) doing surgery with Butch and a student. We love WSU! Although we still are loyal to BYU, living near WSU is pretty great.

Lately

 

Lately I have been busy doing some fun projects. It’s not quite time to plant the garden yet, so I have been busy doing other stuff outside. We are keeping 3 chicks as laying hens. It is against some rules but all of our neighbors are very excited and encouraging about it. (Like I need encouragement.) They like to say, “When we have fresh eggs.” Hmmm. Here is the completed chicken coop, I mean playhouse. I’ll make a small run off of it soon with dog-eared fence so that no one will see the birds. I salvaged some flooring and put it in for easier cleaning.

This weekend I painted a commissioned painting for a friend. You can see in the picture a smaller painting that this one is based on. She found that image on the internet.

Clara and I built a fort out of sticks recently. Jeremy calls it a hobbit house. The kids are having fun in it. It’s in the garden area and I’ll plant scarlet runner beans up it soon. We were inspired by an artist named Patrick Dougherty. You should google his stick sculptures and forts. They are amazing!

   

Easter

We had a nice Easter. We wanted to take the trailer out for the first time but the weather was crummy so it got postponed. Jeremy still took a couple of days off of work and we had a fun library day where we checkout out a bazillion books, came home and read them by the fire with hot chocolate (it was raining). We also went to the local Nez Perce Museum. It was cool to see the original church from the 1800’s that missionaries had built and was still in use. We also hit a geocache downtown.

The Easter egg hunt was cold but fun. Butch the WSU cougar mascot always shows up and here he is posing with Zack. It was nice to wake up on Easter and stay in p.j.s and listen to the prophet while celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

      

Easter Break

 

 Over the kids’ Easter break I painted their pediatric dentist’s office. Luckily it only took about 9 hours so we were able to do other stuff too. But it will fund the patio cover that I hope we get built this summer. :) It is supposed to be like an old train station, and there will be an electric train going around the perimeter of the room near the top.

It’s Chickmania!

With lots of advice from Aunt Annie and her family, we have been having chick mania! Clara incubated 39 eggs. So far 12 have hatched. More are due to hatch Saturday. They are soooo cute! We have been having so much fun watching them be born! Jeremy even had to do an assist. (The kids are calling it a c-section birth.) Here’s the pictures in progression but I did it backwards but you get the idea. We already have sold 7 chicks.

     

Trains, Eggs, and Automobiles

Today was a fantastic day. I drove out to a small town nearby to pick up some chicken hatching eggs for us to incubate. Clara is also using this as her science fair project. With Aunt Annie’s expert advice, we should have some baby chicks for Clara to sell in about 21 days. Clara is marking the progress on a chart and in a journal for her project. She is VERY excited!

As for trains, while I was driving to pick up the eggs, we passed a place that often has a train engine parked nearby. Today the engine was running, but not moving. Zack and I stopped to watch it and the conductor came over and asked us if we wanted to ride in the engine! We were sooooo excited. They let Zack sit on the engineer’s lap and drive the train forward about 100ft. Then they switched tracks and we backed up and hooked on a car. It was AWESOME! Here is the train. I will try to post the video of Zack driving the train and honking the horn. It was a great day!

Happy Valentines Day!

We sure celebrated Valentines this year. The kids had Friday off of school for a teacher inservice day, so their parties were Thurs. The kids enjoyed getting cards in the mail and making sugar cookies. The girls and I have gotten into cake decorating. We are learning but having lots of fun!